Issue 04/2016

Toys
Buss Laboratory Kneader MX 30-22
for future developments.” Bio-on is currently in
contact with almost all the major players in the plastic
toys sector, but the first partner with whom it began
a collaboration is Italeri (Calderara di Reno, Italy), a
long-standing leader in the static scale modelling
field that designs, produces and sells in over 50
countries around the world and has a catalogue of
hundreds of pieces, from the humble soldier to the
aircraft carrier, with highly complex moulds.
“We have always been very attentive in our choice
of plastics,” said Gian Pietro Parmeggiani, who in
1962 founded Italeri near Bologna with Giuliano
Malservisi, “and being able to create new models
today with an eco-sustainable and completely natural
material projects us towards the future. We feel
involved in a journey, more than a simple business
deal, that will bear fruit in the coming years.” One of
the company’s reasons for collaborating with Bio-on
on the development of this material was the strategic
decision to win back the young and particularly the
under 14s: an interesting challenge for a sector that
seemed to have been abandoned by the young.
However, Italeri has succeeded in bringing 3,500
students from some twenty schools (between 11 and
18 years of age) from the Emilia Romagna region
into a collaboration project with the Italian Ministry
of Education to teach modelling technique. “In
many schools around the world, there is a return to
the manual activities lost through excessive use of
computers and smartphones,” explains Parmeggiani,
“with this project and through modelling, we want
to show the usefulness of manual activities in
education. To be able to do that in the future with
Supertoys natural products will place us at the
cutting-edge in the coming years and in general
will give undisputed added value to our production,
including that targeting adults.”
Italeri’s technicians and Bio-on’s researchers are
running dozens of tests thanks to the availability of
the many different-sized moulds used for the 600
models, including military vehicles, helicopters,
ships, trucks, cars and motorcycles, for an overall
production of approximately 1,500 items. For now,
Supertoys development is at the experimental stage
and no criticality has been encountered.
All of this began at the laboratories of Bio-on,
which designed and patented the world’s first fully
bio-based PHAs plastic (certified since 2014 by the
United States Department of Agriculture – USDA)
and 100 % naturally biodegradable in water and
soil (certified since 2008 by Vinçotte) without the use
of chemical solvents. This exceptional product is
obtained through the natural fermentation of bacteria
fed by by-products from the agricultural industry
with no competition with food supply chains. Bio-on
biopolymers have exceptional properties that adapt
to the injection and extrusion methods currently in
use in the plastic industry and can cover a vast range
of strategic applications: biomedical, packaging,
design, clothing, automotive… and now toys too. MT
www.bio-on.it
Buss Kneader Technology
Leading Compounding Technology
for heat and shear sensitive plastics
For more than 60 years Buss Kneader technology
has been the benchmark for continuous preparation
of heat and shear sensitive compounds –
a respectable track record that predestines this
technology for processing biopolymers such
as PLA and PHA.
> Uniform and controlled shear mixing
> Extremely low temperature profile
> Precise temperature control
> High filler loadings
Buss AG
Switzerland
www.busscorp.com
bioplastics MAGAZINE [04/16] Vol. 11 27